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For those who don't already know this, if you're planning on preordering the Blu-ray box set at amazon.co.jp, you're out of luck. They took the page out of their site, and for a time had "This item is currently not available" displayed. The other option at the moment is CDJapan, but you'll have to pay about $250 dollars instead of the $200 on Amazon Japan.

As for me, I've already made my preorder, despite me not having a Blu-ray player yet. I plan on seeing how things go in the Fall with more players and movies for Blu-ray coming out before I decide on which player I want.

Heh. I'm just hoping I'll be able to afford the cost of mine come October. Considering a few other things I have happening around then, including pretty much the only con I can actually attend here in AU, the financial cupboard might be a bit barer than I would like.

Still. Air. ^_^

-Andiyar

__________________

"Any good that I may do here, let me do now, for I may not pass this way again"

Heh. I'm just hoping I'll be able to afford the cost of mine come October. Considering a few other things I have happening around then, including pretty much the only con I can actually attend here in AU, the financial cupboard might be a bit barer than I would like.

Still. Air. ^_^

-Andiyar

I'll happily pay you for it and take that one if you like

Still, sent YesAsia an email asking nicely if they could stock it, otherwise I'm just going to have to pray I can get a credit card before CDJapan runs out of stock too.

Hrm. If you can, just place an order using any payment method possible - Amazon accepts bank transfers and such, doesn't it? You can easily go in and edit the payment method after the order is placed, so the important thing would be to get an order actually in their system, then apply for a credit card / VISA debit card or something similar.

From reading Amazon's web site - the one to go with is 'Convenience Store/ATM...' payment. Sounds like they accept the order, and then send you an invoice when the item is ready to ship, and then you pay it. I have no idea if your bank supports the relevant Internet Banking payment... but it doesn't matter, if gives you two months to find another way. ^_^

-Andiyar

__________________

"Any good that I may do here, let me do now, for I may not pass this way again"

Hrm. If you can, just place an order using any payment method possible - Amazon accepts bank transfers and such, doesn't it? You can easily go in and edit the payment method after the order is placed, so the important thing would be to get an order actually in their system, then apply for a credit card / VISA debit card or something similar.

From reading Amazon's web site - the one to go with is 'Convenience Store/ATM...' payment. Sounds like they accept the order, and then send you an invoice when the item is ready to ship, and then you pay it. I have no idea if your bank supports the relevant Internet Banking payment... but it doesn't matter, if gives you two months to find another way. ^_^

...I never would've thought of that. Put the order in now and it hasn't asked for any other details, and changing looks easy enough. Makes sense for it to work too especially seen as it says there about changing card expiry dates and stuff. Should have my card within a few weeks too, hopefully.

Hate to burst some people's bubbles, but apparently the BD set is just an upconverted version of the SD masters, with the new OP being the only thing that's in HD.
Source: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/do...60818/pony.htm
Now granted, there will probably be less compression artifacts in the BD release because Pony Canyon is throwing more bitrate at the same amount of information, but I'm not paying $200+ for something that's only marginally better than my R2 set.

Confirmed on the official AIR site here. Although they claim that there will be a 'difference' to normal upscaling due to some new algorithm.... this really, really disappoints me. I am now wondering if I should really bother - though admittedly I don't have the R2, so it's a 'first time buy' for me. What I'm wondering is why Pony Canyon aren't using a better master for this... surely KyoAni could provide a true HD master?

-Andiyar

__________________

"Any good that I may do here, let me do now, for I may not pass this way again"

Don't pretend to get all this stuff about SD Masters and whatnot, but it's a bit of a disappointment. Still, at half the price of the R2s (some of which are really hard to get now anyway) and with the fact it will be higher quality, even if it's not by as much as I hoped, I'm still going to order it. Besides, a bluray player will probably hit me before enough Japanese fluency to watch the episodes on their own does, and I don't want to touch DVDSubber ever again. It'll just make the loss easier if I don't get it.

Okay. Well, Standard Definition and High Definition are referring to the quality of the masters that the disks are encoded from, and to the final quality of the video on the disks. The primary thing to consider here is pixel resolution - AIR is a show broadcast in an aspect ratio of 16:9. In standard definition, this means the picture is 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels high - this is considered standard for NTSC television and DVD. (For PAL the height is instead 576 pixels, and there's a lot of fun involving FPS etc. Let's not go there tonight ^_^). In high definition, as Blu-ray is meant to be and as you'd expect a Blu-ray version of AIR to be, the resolution is somewhat higher. The minimum resolution for high definition is 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels high, with progressive scan - this is referred to as 720p HD video. HD also refers to 1080i and 1080p video - which are interlaced and progressive scan, respecively, and boast a resolution of 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high.

Additionally, HD video allows a far higher bitrate than SD video - basically (though perhaps not perfectly accurate...) the more bitrate, the better, at least assuming we're using masters and codecs that will benefit from the increased bitrate.

I've 'pinched' a chart from Wikipedia that might help illustrate what I'm talking about with resolution at any rate:

Okay, so ignoring the blue stuff on the right (We shouldn't but for the sake of this we will) the original source for the AIR disks on Blu-ray will be the yellow bit on the chart, plus the little orange bit on the left - where it says 480p - in terms of screen resolution. A true HD master would be either the dark orange part (720p) or the red part (1080p). As you can see, the image size is enormously increased, and in terms of HD video, the greater the resolution, the better the quality.

What they've announced they are doing with the AIR masters is taking a 480i/p image and upscaling it to (assumedly) 720p, that is encoding the master to a higher resolution than it was originally intended to be seen in. And they've said this will look great etc etc, but... it's still a 480i/p master. Basically, they're cheating and not actually providing real high definition video for this AIR set. Which is very disappointing, considering that Blu-ray is intended as a high definition format.

As to the cancellation of preorders... you know, i wouldn't be incredibly surprised. Imagine, you're a Japanese fan who has bought the LE R2s, and has snapped up a Blu-ray player (or will be snapping up a PS3) for your high-def anime fix. AIR is coming out, so naturally you'll get another copy - hey, it's AIR, and it's HD! Oh wait... it's not really. It's in fact the same, but altered slightly so it might look, oh, 10% better. Give or take. And it's another 300,000 yen, after you've already dropped 7000 yen per volume for seven volumes.

I can see my reaction right there. And I'm wondering now too - the bitrate is reported to be averaging around 40mbps, which is very nice, should eliminate those issues Pony Canyon had with compression artifacts in the original releases, which I've heard were a bit poorly mastered - insufficient bitrate, perhaps. So that's fine... but the lack of a proper HD master, meaning upscaling causing possible problems in itself?

I may need to rethink this. If I'm paying for a PS3 or Blu-ray player, I'm looking for fantastic video. Not for 'hey, somewhat better than DVD!' video.

-Andiyar

__________________

"Any good that I may do here, let me do now, for I may not pass this way again"

I wonder if an HD master even exists? BS-i also broadcast an upsampled SD version...maybe that's all that was produced, since it would have been adequate for broadcast and DVD release. With HD-DVD and Blu-ray still over a year away at the time, perhaps KyoAni judged that it wasn't worth the time and expense to render an HD version as well? I can see that being the case, but I'm still disappointed that they aren't giving us a true HD version now that suitable media formats are available. Time and money again, I suppose...

I wonder if an HD master even exists? BS-i also broadcast an upsampled SD version...maybe that's all that was produced, since it would have been adequate for broadcast and DVD release. With HD-DVD and Blu-ray still over a year away at the time, perhaps KyoAni judged that it wasn't worth the time and expense to render an HD version as well? I can see that being the case, but I'm still disappointed that they aren't giving us a true HD version now that suitable media formats are available. Time and money again, I suppose...

I don't know if a HD master exists, but the backgrounds they used (painted by AniVillage) were definitely higher quality than SD.